How can Nabble be improved?
I recently received the following e-mail from the founders of Nabble:
You are the first person (literally) to recognize the value of Nabble.
So far, Nabble has been well received. But it needs more users. There
are a lot of open source projects archived on Nabble, but how do we go
about letting people know about us? We would like project owners to link to
us and skin us like you did with appfuse, but I am not sure how to do
it. You know many people in the open source world, so we would really
like to hear your thoughts and advice.
For example, should I go and announce Nabble on a project list? If so,
should I do it on the dev list or user list? Is this considered OK or
spam? Or should I contact the mailing list owner by private email?
What nabble feature do you consider most useful to the project owners?
My response to the first paragraph:
I would suggest e-mailing project owners and pointing out projects like AppFuse and Maven that've taken the time to "skin" their forums. I'm guessing you could get some real good traction at Apache because they like to keep everything on mailing lists. People like your forums because they can post (and subscribe to) a single message. AFAIK, you can't do this with any other mailing list archive. Maybe you could write an article for TSS or InfoQ that tells all the features and highlights projects that are using it.
As far as announcing Nabble on a project list, I said:
I would do it on the dev list, but sending private e-mail is probably
OK as well. I don't think it will be perceived as spam. Sending it
to the dev list might skip a step for the project founder. You could
also offer to "skin" forums for folks - so it looks like their project
sites. I think the most useful feature for end-users is search and
easy browsing. It's *much* better than the archiving/browsing tool
that Apache uses.
One thing that might attract for folks is vanity URLs. I don't know
if it's possible, but something as simple as appfuse.nabble.com might
be attractive to some people, or having some sort of path-based URL,
for example archive.nabble.com/java/java.net/appfuse. That way it'd
be easier for folks to "guess" the URLs of mailing list archives.
What's your advice? What should Nabble do to get more users? Maybe if folks new about Nabble's RSS feeds, they'd use it more. I'm currently subscribed to Maven, Wicket, Shale and Stripes, just to name a few.
Blogging is one way to go because it provides for informal entries about particular features. Blogging lowers the barrier to writing because it doesn't require a formal article that abides by many requirements. It also allows the world to get to know the people and philosophies behind Nabble.
Another great way to get exposure it to start writing articles. The really great thing about Nabble is that it's not a niche - i.e., it's not only for a the Java community or only for the PHP community, etc. This means that articles about Nabble can be published in many publications spanning many different areas of open source. The one thing that the Java community might be interested in knowing more about is Nabble's architecture. I've seen the About page, but I'm curious to know about how Nabble is designed.
Another huge, untapped opportunity for Nabble is to offer a downloadable version of it for use in private environments. I had this need recently (and still do). But upon asking in the Nabble support forum I was told that this wouldn't be offered anytime soon :-(.
Making at least some APIs from Nabble available for developers would also bolster the project. Integration into different tools is something I've always wanted for Nabble. For example, I've always wanted a plugin that provides a URL for each mailing list message I receive. In many cases, I have the need for a URL to pass along to others and manually looking up the message on Nabble is tedious.
A short Flash movie about skinning Nabble would be a huge help. Even if people know about Nabble, most aren't aware that a forum can even be skinned. And showing the MusicBrainz forum was skinned would be a great example.
I could keep going, but I'll stop here for now. If you want some more ideas, ping me :-).
Posted by Bruce Snyder on November 18, 2006 at 09:40 AM MST #
Posted by Muthu Ramadoss on November 18, 2006 at 12:05 PM MST #
Posted by Lars Fischer on November 18, 2006 at 01:29 PM MST #
1) get interested in a project
2) join the dev list for a while, be able to post, but do not subscribe
3) remove the group from the interface when you're done, and be able to add it back later
Coupled with thunderbird's interface, you get threads and the ability to "forget" about a list for a while and catch up later. A www interface exists as well, though it is not as polished/fast as nabble's.
Posted by Renaud Bruyeron on November 20, 2006 at 01:55 AM MST #
Posted by Bron on November 20, 2006 at 01:33 PM MST #
How to make it better? I agree with these comments, above:
I'll add that I'd love to work on an NNTP gateway plugin. If I had the source (and the license) to do so...
Yeah. How does nabble plan to scale? If all forums are free, and everyone has unlimited uploads... what happens the day you DO get famous (or, say, just get slashdotted) and thousands of new forums spring up in a day?
Who will pay for the storage? the bandwidth? Can more servers easily be added to the system to handle many more forums, or a sudden huge jump in traffic?
Right. Even assuming the architecture can scale, how will nabble.com fund its growth, with no revenue?
The suspicion Bron mentions is fueled by the fact that there is no About Us page on the site, telling us, (the hordes of would-be open-source project developer users) you're asking how to attract, who you are!
Is nabble.com just one guy? A small company? A venture-capital backed startup? A loosely organized global band of developers? A division of Sun or Microsoft? :-)
Where and how is it hosted? Is this running on a Commodore 64 in the founder's mother's basement? A $99/month EV-1 server? A cluster of Cray's at a palace in Dubai?
Your potential users want to know the answers to these types of questions (before they put their eggs in your basket).
I for one would be happy to hear that a (modestly priced) paid service was planned to fund future growth and offer users an option to upgrade to a premium SLA. Or that you planned to get ad revenue to pay the bills. Or something, really anything, that sounded like it could last, long-term.
Maybe the nicest way to do this would be to start a nabble forum ...about nabble! and put a prominent link on the homepage, so people checking you out can use your system (and great search) to read about your system and find the questions others have asked about it, and whatever answers you chose to post...
Posted by Daid Kaufman on July 11, 2007 at 12:37 PM MDT #
Posted by Tech on December 09, 2007 at 12:38 AM MST #
Posted by Jay Bryant on December 14, 2007 at 11:11 AM MST #
Posted by Matthew Doan on July 24, 2009 at 03:26 AM MDT #
Posted by Matthew Doan on July 24, 2009 at 08:24 AM MDT #
Posted by MDirect on March 23, 2010 at 03:06 PM MDT #